WASHINGTON — Yoga is moving from the studio mat to the museum gallery.

The Smithsonian Institution has organized what curators call the first exhibition about the art, origins, visual history and evolution of yoga.

The Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery will showcase “Yoga: The Art of Transformation” through January. The exhibit will later travel to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Curators brought together Indian sculptures, manuscripts and paintings, as well as posters, illustrations, photographs and films to showcase yoga’s 2,000-year history.

The exhibit “examines for the first time a spectacular, but until now largely ignored, archive,” said museum director Julian Raby. “That archive is India’s visual culture of extraordinary yoga-related artworks created, as you will see, over some two millennia.”

For the exhibit, curator Debra Diamond said, the Smithsonian borrowed some of the greatest masterpieces in Indian art as well as pieces that have never before been shown.

The exhibit begins with the concepts and practices of yoga, including meditation and poses found in Indian art dating back hundreds of years.

An 11th-century sculpture represents a yoga teacher seated in the lotus pose with legs crossed to signify enlightenment.

Such sculptures were shown in Hindu temples so people could see the teacher and “understand yoga’s transformative potential,” Diamond said.

Three life-size sculptures of yogini goddesses from Hindu temples illustrate the belief that female powers could be used to allow practitioners to achieve divinity and enlightenment.

The exhibit also examines the spread of yoga worldwide, Diamond said.

Early American posters, along with a 1902 film by Thomas Edison, depict yoga practitioners as magicians.

Knowing the background of yoga is important for how Americans think about it today, Diamond said.

“There are so many debates and contestations about what yoga is in America,” she said. “Is it a profound individual embodied system of transformation? Or is it the thing that spawned a $5 billion industry in which yoga is used to sell cars?”

The exhibit is paid for in part by the Smithsonian’s first major crowd-funding campaign, which raised $174,000 in six weeks.

The Alec Baldwin Foundation is also a notable sponsor. Last year, the actor married a yoga instructor.

In connection with the exhibit, teachers will lead yoga classes on Wednesdays and Sundays at the museum.

Visitors will see that yoga involves more than poses and breathing, said John Schumacher, a yoga practitioner and teacher in Washington who served as an adviser for the exhibit.

“It teaches where yoga comes from,” he said. “You see there is a deep, philosophical underpinning to all of these practices and a variety of different philosophies.”